A couple of weeks ago, The New York City 2017 April Fools’ Day Parade “Trumpathon”, the world’s largest gathering of Donald Trump look-alikes, was included in a TBS NEWS report about Donald Trump’s “Fake News Awards”. Watch to the end. Story is in Japanese and the link will only be available for a limited time.

Michele Bachmann, the former Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, indicated last year that she was looking for a sign from God about whether she should run for the U.S. Senate.

God ― or rather a prankster claiming to be the deity ― answered with an actual sign:

Bachmann, one of Trump’s evangelical advisors, told doomsday food salesman Jim Bakker in December that people have been urging her to run in November’s special election for the seat Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) vacated after a sexual harassment scandal. Bachmann said she trusts “in a big God” and that she was supposed to run for president, referring to her failed 2012 bid, which she called “wildly successful.”

“I fulfilled the calling God gave me,” Bachmann said. “So the question is: Am I being called to do this now? I don’t know.”

If she’s looking for a sign, she might want to check out the billboard in St. Paul, Minnesota, which appeared to be the result of a crowdfunding project from the satirical website thegoodlordabove.com.

This year’s Oscar nominations are in, and there have been some surprises, like a Wolverine sequel becoming the first superhero movie to garner a screenplay nomination. It seems The Academy seeks to reshape its image, and you know what would really reshape everyone’s attitude toward this business of show? If movie posters were brutally, hilariously honest.

As we have in previous years, we’ve collected our favorite honest posters for the films with at least one nomination in any category for the 90th Academy Awards (full nominees list here). Many of these come courtesy of The Shiznit and this College Humor post, along with several other posts. Read more

Snopes sheds light on the origins of another beloved Christmas myth: “The story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer… was developed for commercial purposes by a Montgomery Ward copywriter at the specific request of his employer…”

Was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer created to bring comfort to a girl whose mother was dying of cancer?

CLAIM
The character ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ was created by a father to bring comfort to his daughter as her mother was dying of cancer.

WHAT’S TRUE
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created by a man whose wife was dying of cancer.

WHAT’S FALSE
The story of Rudolph was created by a father to bring comfort to his daughter as her mother lay dying of cancer.

ORIGIN
To most of us, the character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, immortalized in song and a popular holiday television special, has always been an essential part of our Christmas folklore, but Rudolph is in fact a mid-twentieth century invention whose creation can be traced to a specific time and person

The New York Post is just catching up… In December of 1984, Joseph Virgil Skaggs (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs) formed WALK RIGHT! — an ad hoc group of vigilante sidewalk etiquette enforcers who patrolled the streets to make New York a better place to live and walk. Dressed in all black with WALK RIGHT! sweat shirts they enforced a list of sixty six rules for pedestrians they wanted enacted into law.

Welcome to Gridlock Central, otherwise known as New York City during the holidays. It helps to remember that you’re not in Kansas anymore — or Manitoba, for that matter. Life will be so much better for yourself and everyone around you if you observe a few basic rules.
In other words, walk this way:

Keep right.
If you’re walking more slowly than the natives — and there’s a good reason for the phrase “a New York minute” — stay to the right on stairs, escalators and sidewalks, so we can step nimbly by you.

Separate.
Two-by-two worked for Noah’s Ark, but not Midtown. If you must hold hands, prepare to break away when we come barreling toward you, desperate to flag that cab. Walking four abreast as a family? Fuhgeddaboutit. Pair off and stay close.

Don’t stop short.
Unless, of course, you’re about to be run over. But certainly step aside and out of traffic’s way to admire that tall building, marvel at a panhandler or snap a selfie. Speaking of which:

Don’t text in revolving doors.
Even seasoned New Yorkers can’t juggle that. You can wait 30 seconds before tweeting, “Guess where I am?”

If you’re looking for something to say, “I love you, happy holidays!!” why not get a chocolate mold of your anus and gift it to your boo? Or, grab a mold of your significant other’s behind to show them just how much you adore their poop shoot. While it seems a bit crazy, and a bit #fakenews, this is the real deal, y’all. If you’re as obsessed with your partner’s ass as they are with yours, show them the right way by making it edible. Edible Anus, a company that specializes in – you guessed it – edible anus’, will send you a box of three chocolate butts for only $10. Magnus Irvin, the owner of Edible Anus, is clearly onto something here.

At the “Robot Dance Protest” at Federal Hall back in the early days of the Dance Liberation Front, from left, patriots John Foster, Rev. Jen, and Faceboy. Photo courtesy Rev. Jen.

It’s time for a victory dance! After 91 years, New York’s archaic Cabaret Law has been repealed in a 41-to-1 vote. So put on your dancin’ shoes, wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care, head to your favorite watering hole, and shake your booty clean off. (We have to wait until 30 days until after de Blasio signs off on the legislation, but it’s never too early to practice your moves at home.)

This victory holds a special space in my heart, as I have been working on the law’s repeal since 1998 when I formed the Dance Liberation Front (DLF), along with fellow Art Stars Robert Prichard and Faceboy.

It all started one morning when I bumped into Robert Prichard, the proprietor of the now-defunct Surf Reality (172 Allen St., btw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.). He told me that the previous evening, Baby Jupiter, a nearby club where I performed every Monday, was busted because their customers had been dancing.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“Dancing?” I asked.

Rob explained that in order to crack down on nightlife, Giuliani had dusted off a regulation from the 1920s called the “Cabaret Law,” which states that more than four people dancing in an unlicensed venue serving alcohol is illegal. Out of the thousands of bars in New York City, only a handful of the most well-financed clubs were able to obtain the dancing license.

It took a minute to process the Kafkaesque concept: Dancing was illegal in “Fun City.”

Rob suggested we create a group — the DLF — to bring to light the heinous crime Guiliani’s nightlife task force was perpetrating on the public. Read the rest of this story here.

When: December 1st, 5-8pm during Oakland’s First Friday
Where: Directly outside the Feelmore Adult Gallery on Telegraph Avenue at 17th Street in San Francisco

The “Get Stuffed” Holiday Special Event will present a lot of entertaining activities, including “Sexual Compatibility” Tarot card readings, games of Spin-the-Bottle and official Church of the SubGenius “short-duration marriages” performed by Dr. Hal Robins. Acknowledging both potential religious restrictions and modern dating rituals, the union provided by these ceremonies dissolves at an agreed upon time.

“A chameleon-like ability to flourish simultaneously in multiple art forms marks the Protean presence of Spy Emerson. No stranger to controversy, her installations and public performances create lively attention wherever they turn up. Her creations, lately the subject of national attention and commentary, are always socially acute and with the essential leavening quality of informed playfulness and humor.” –Dr. Hal Robins, Church of the SubGenius

​Email scammers work in bulk, blasting out tons of emails in the hopes of getting a few bites which they can follow up on. To counter this, NetSafe, an online safety non-profit in New Zealand, built Re:scam, which messes with scammers automatically:

Re:scam can take on multiple personas, imitating real human tendencies with humour and grammatical errors, and can engage with infinite scammers all at once, meaning it can continue any email conversation for as long as possible. Re:scam will now turn the tables on the scammers by wasting their time, and ultimately damage the profits for scammers…
The aim is to waste the time of scammers, without wasting a second of yours. When you forward an email, you believe to be a scam to me@rescam.org a check is done to make sure it is a scam attempt, and then a proxy email address is used to engage the scammer. This will flood their inboxes with responses without any way for them to tell who is a chat-bot, and who is a real vulnerable target. Once you’ve forwarded an email nothing more is required on your part, but the more you send through, the more effective it will be [Re:scam]

In the early 1980s, a series of shadowy street paintings — life-size monsters and cowboys — loomed large over the East Village. Anticipating the works of Banksy by more than a decade, the unsigned figures were created under cover of darkness on buildings and bridges. They weren’t mere graffiti, but painterly works reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Downtown residents buzzed about who could be behind them.

The art world knew who it was: a soft-spoken Canadian — often clad in a cravat and sunglasses — named Richard Hambleton.

At downtown galleries, his mysterious figures fetched thousands of dollars more than work by his friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He attended parties with beautiful women on his arm, and Andy Warhol begged him, in vain, to sit for a portrait.

Hambleton canvased Manhattan with some 450 shadow men — and managed to get a few on the Berlin Wall, too. But by the 1990s, he was largely forgotten, living in a drug den on the Lower East Side. He was so poor that he would shoot himself up with heroin, then use the blood in his needle as paint. Read more here.

15 year old Brady Olsen ran for President in 2016. It was his way of dissenting against the 2-party system. He did a pretty good job of it. Now that his story is history, the Feds have decided to pursue him on a technicality… faulty paper-work. They’re trying to stop other pretenders from making a mockery of our mock-worthy election system. Maybe in 20 years he’ll run for real.

It’s no secret that Mr. Nuts isn’t an actual person. Olson had revealed his true identity in 2015 and said he made up the candidate because he was fed up with the two-party system.

Olson wasn’t eligible from the start—constitutionally, presidents have to be at least 35 years old—but he was popular.

“I am a 15-year-old who filled out a form, had the campaign catch on fire, and am now putting up the best third-party numbers since Ross Perot,” he told the Guardian a 2015 email interview.

In August 2015, just after Trump launched his campaign, Public Policy Polling found that Nuts had the support of about 6 percent of voters in New Hampshire. By August 2016, as the race was entering its final stages, Nuts’ numbers in Texas showed he was more popular than Green Party nominee Jill Stein (but less well-liked than the late revered gorilla Harambe).

His campaign inspired more than a chuckle—as the National Journal wrote, Nuts “started a revolution.” Dozens of people filed forms with fake identities, like Limberbutt McCubbins, Mr. Crawfish B. Crawfish and Sydneys Voluptuous Buttocks.

About

Welcome to the Art of the Prank, produced and edited by Joey Skaggs. Here you will find insights, information, news and discussions about art, pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming & reality hacking around the world - past, present and future - mainstream and counter culture. You are invited to contribute to its development. May your journey be filled with more than your expectations.